Gregisdead121 ’s Reviews > Break It Down > Status Update

She decides to call several people. She tells herself she has to talk to
some people. She is worried, and then she is angry at herself for worrying,
for always thinking about herself and for always looking at the world so
darkly. But she doesn’t know how to stop.

One day she sees an apartment she is willing to take. It is not very pretty,
but she is ready to take it because she wants to have a home again, she
wants to be bound to this city by a lease, she doesn’t want to go on feeling
the way she does, loose in the world, the only one without any place.

She knows that if she speaks on the telephone, her voice will
communicate something no one will want to listen to.

Though of course she knew it might be true that when the time came, a
hat and that freedom would not make up for everything else she had lost
with the coming of old age. And now that she had said this out loud, she
thought maybe there was no joy, after all, in even thinking about such
freedom.

Sometimes I imagined that I was Mr. Martin’s daughter, at other times his
wife, at other times even his dog. I forgot that I was nothing more than a
housemaid.

‘This is all very well, I
have found my clothes and I am dressed, but where am I myself? Where in
the world am I?’ And he looked and looked, but it was a vain search; he
could not find himself. And that is how it is with us,

dont know how i feel about this book. at parts its writing can be concussive but contrastingly so much of it can ring hollow if not slightly cringe. Maybe my expectations from Isaac's glowing recommendation & reverence for the author have made my expectations unreasonable? idk

some war; their hatred is so familiar that they are unaware of it. They are
sometimes tender with one another, because they forget.
But the faces of the two sisters in death are bitter by long habit.

Not for the first time, he puzzled over the curious nature of families
—that family bonds tended to keep together people who had little in
common.
He would never have chosen the members of his family as friends. He
thought it was odd that he should have been obliged to go to the apartment
of this dirty stranger and handle his things.